Improve or destroy? Will Laurence Graff, aka The King of Diamonds, yet again buy a famed historic diamond only to recut it to make it more saleable?


That is what he did to the big blue Wittelsbach (see above photo © Ernst A. Heiniger ) after he bought the historic stone at Christies. I wrote about that unhappy saga in the Financial Times. The importance of such a stone is not only its carat weight and color but the less commercially measurable associations it has with the people who have worn it, owned it, given it, treasured it, hidden it, used it for power and glory. Once recut it is just a big fat diamond. And, in the case of the king of diamonds, a brand nam.  He promptly renamed his  recut blue stone, the Wittelsbach-Graff.



 Now the Beau Sancy (right) is coming up for auction at Sotheby's and there is reason for lovers of extraordinary historic gems to worry.  This pale yellow diamond was probably found at Golconda, and certainly found in India, more than 400 years.It weighs a smidgen under 35 carats. It has many royal associations not least of them this: The Sancy was worn by the Florentine Maria de' Medici at her 1610 coronation as Queen Consort to the French king Henri IV. (See below.) It will be auction in Geneva on May 14-15 with an estimate of from $2-$4 million.

Cima da Conegliano in Venice, Paris and at a click away on Google Books.





Art lovers or just the art curious can raise a glass in a toast to Google books. It isn't likely that anyone will depend on the site the way we all depend on googling. But what a world it opens up; it's like having an amazing art library a couple of clicks away. The time it saves; the money and space. Yesterday, I was reading the notes I made a couple of days ago in Paris at the Musee du Luxembourg's just opened exhibition devoted to the Italian Renaissance painter Cima da Conegliano. (Above is my favorite of his paintings. It is not in the show but hangs above the altar in the hard to find-- even for Venice--church of St. Giovanni Bragora.) Even I have trouble making out my handwriting and it's at its worst when I am looking and writing at the same time. I could not figure out the words I'd copied from the wall text which quoted the art scholar Bernard Berenson.  I certainly know the source from which they were taken. Literally seconds later I'd found both, thanks to Google books. His book, Venetian Painting in America was right there. As its cover image is now right here. With a few more clicks taking me to the pages where Cima is mentioned, I found the very words:  “No other master of that time paints so well the pearly light that models the Italian landscape with a peculiar lightness and breadth.” To my mischievous delight the museum's wall text (as well as my scribbles) had got it wrong. "Silver" is not pearly, "models" is not the same as envelops. I did not point this out in my ==very favorable--Economist review of the show which will appear at the end of the coming week.